Who led the Turiya Jungle Satyagraha ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Mooka Lohar. The commission's key credits Mooka Lohar with leading the jungle satyagraha at Turiya, in Seoni district. The jungle satyagrahas were the Central Provinces' own form of the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930: where the coast broke the salt law, forest villages broke the forest law — cutting grass, felling wood and grazing cattle inside reserved forests from which colonial forest rules had shut them out — and the protests were met with police force.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Not the name recorded for Turiya. Madhya Pradesh's freedom-struggle chapter carries many Thakur-title leaders, and the paper uses one here as a decoy.  (b) A plausible-sounding tribal name for a forest satyagraha, but it is not the leader the commission's key attaches to the Turiya episode.  (c) Ganjan Singh Korku is remembered in accounts of the jungle satyagraha in the Betul district area (the Ghora Dongri agitation) during the same 1930 wave — a different site from Turiya, which is the trap this option sets.

Concept: Colonial forest law — the Indian Forest Act of 1878 and then of 1927 — divided forests into reserved, protected and village categories and turned customary use (grazing, firewood, minor forest produce, shifting cultivation) into a punishable offence. When the Congress called for civil disobedience in 1930, forest-dependent communities in the Central Provinces and central India expressed it in the terms that mattered to them: mass entry into reserved forests to cut grass and wood in open defiance of the forest department. These are the jungle satyagrahas, and Turiya in Seoni district is one of their sites.

State PCS 2025 Q100 — Madhya Pradesh GK PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q100 — Madhya Pradesh GK PYQ with Answer